Yesterday was spent at the Screenburn Arcade over at South by Southwest – hence the lack of news coming from the site yesterday. I had planned on spending a fair bit of time at the free section of the SXSW event going on here in Austin, but quickly discovered that was going to be unlikely. Suffice to say, the expo was, well, tiny. Extremely tiny.
There were approximately two companies there: Gendai Games , who are indie developers working on a spiffy project called GameSalad which is designed to allow people with no programming experience to create Flash games easily, and Critical Mass who are an outsourcing development studio for games and films. Given that I already knew the Gendai Games people and Critical Mass was largely focused on running gamers through Halo 3 matches up against the professional girl gamer they had at their booth, that was only minorly interesting.
Still, it turned out to be fairly good in the end, although largely not for the actual Arcade event. Instead, I managed to meet a few interesting people from a couple of companies after being tipped off to a premiere party for an upcoming indie comedy movie called 2 Bobs, which focuses on two game developers who have their game stolen before launch and begin tracking down the thieves. Also, I can totally say I attended a movie premiere party. So, the day was far from a bust.
Also, I’m not a fan of PureVolume. Sorry guys, but waiting outside of an empty bar/club for over an hour with the rest of your RSVP’d guests is just dumb.
